Terror in Tick Canyon

Synopsis
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Exotic Animals

Other films by Wayne Bauer for more information
 

Synopsis 

A young girl is brutally attacked at an animal trainging compound.   She's savagely killed by something hidden in the pepper trees by the animal cages.

Matt, the manager of the compound, feels he must close the compound until the murderer is found.  Bobrick, the owner, won't close the compound and risk losing government money he gets for animal trainee students that arrive today. This is the first time Matt has heard of this financial arrangement and it upsets him because he never sees the money put back into the compound which is in desperate need of it.

Matt meets the arriving students, still upset what he now knows. Somehow he has found meat to feed the animals. Despite his best efforts things around the compound keep getting worse: a commercial using her animals is rejected, so there goes big royalties down the drain. He owes back taxes to the IRS.  A student at the compound is bitten by a rattlesnake.

Another student, Dee Dee, a voluptuous young thing, flirts with Matt in order to get close to the tiger.   Matt' wife, Jenna becomes jealous. This strains their relationship but Jenna fights to keep them together.   In a fit of jealous rage she confronts Dee Dee and beats the crap out of her.

An IRS collections agent secretly investigating Bobrick for misappropriation of federal funds is unknowingly hired as a helping hand. Shortly after arriving he mysteriously disappears.

Matt and Timmy, the no good hired hand, are loading a hundred chickens into a van for transport to a location shoot. Timmy forgets to set the brake, the van rolls down the driveway and flips over allowing all the chickens to escape.

Later the same day Timmy compounds her problems when Matt catches him peeping at the female students in their dorm. Matt, discovering missing animal drugs, naturally accuses Timmy. Shortly thereafter Timmy is mysteriously killed by something that literally bites his head off.

Wanting to be "one with the tiger" Dee Dee steals the keys to the cage from Matt while distracting him with a thinly disguised act of seduction.

Dee Dee enters the tiger's cage totally naked and is brutally mauled and ripped in half.  The tiger escapes into the night.  Matt, discovering Dee Dee's bloody torso, tracks the escaped tiger but fails to find her.

The next night, two of the students disappear while videotaping nocturnal animals.

Several days later the local Sheriff tells Matt his tiger has been found and shot. This news puts him right over the edge. She drinks heavily as her pet baboon comforts her grooming her hand.

Later in the compound feed shed, Matt stands by as one of her dogs tears apart the nosey contract veterinarian who is becoming too curious about why the tigers seem so healthy and robust.

Jenna looks at the video tape from the camera of the two unfortunate students and, to her horror, discovers that Matt has murdered the students in order to feed the hungry tigers. He is shocked when she accuses him of being the murderer.

Bobrick accuses Matt of embezzling from him in order to buy meat for the animals. In a blind rage Matt jabs a syringe full of drugs into her own arm. He physically transform into a hideous ravening monster before Bobrick's eyes. In an instant Matt becomes the "terror" that has been plaguing Tick Canyon.

In a final act of revenge the "beast" kills Bobrick, just as the Sheriff arrives. The climactic end comes when the "beast" is cornered in his own house.